Helena Gray
Genres: Urban fantasy, horror, crime, supernatural, drama. she was soft, she was unbroken, dressed in the pink she wore as a token Helena is a spirited (or "tempestuous," if you prefer) young woman from the Pendle Hill area of Lancashire, presently living in London with a flatmate. She is also "blessed" with supernatural gifts which make her a witch, bound at birth and triggered only recently. She's a little bit of a party girl, defiant and shameless about her love of a good time, and a little bit of an outsider, too, no matter where she goes or what she does. always clean, always cautious; she was the devil and she danced with roses Full name: Helena Louise Gray. Age/DOB: 20; December 21, 1989. Zodiac: Sagittarius; Dragon year. Profession: University student, dancer (hip-hop, freestyle), amateur writer, bakery/cafe assistant. Height/Weight/Build: 5'10"/128 lbs/slim. Hair/Skin/Eyes: Black/olive/brown. Ethnicity/Nationality: Mother is of mixed Filipino and Egyptian descent (not unheard of in Egypt), father is English; born in Britain. Education: St. Mary Magdalene's School for Girls in Colne, Lancashire; King's College, currently. Notable residences: * Newchurch-in-Pendle * Other London residence * Presently lives in London, at 4B Park Princess Manor. Family: Father (Marcus Gray, b. 1964, works as a painter), mother (Isadora Araña-Gray, born in Egypt, retained her married name after the divorce b. 1968, works for GCHQ as an analyst, with a cover job in accounting), maternal aunt (Lailani Araña, born in Egypt, b. 1975, unmarried, lives in Bristol, teaches primary school). Description: Helena is very tall, very confident (which shows in her posture), and very pretty (which probably lends itself to the confidence, which can come across as a touch cocky if she's feeling like it). She has the million miles of leg and slim build that might have suggest she could have been a model, but she's not quite thin enough for the sample sizes, and her type of prettiness is not the quirky, ethereal, alien beauty that's prized in modern modeling. She might have done well in the pre-heroin chic 90s! "Classical" looks are generally associated with white women or women with traditionally white features, but there is something a bit old-fashioned about her appearance, which favors her Filipino mother quite a bit: large, dark brown eyes, arched brows, slightly upturned and otherwise straight nose, full lips and wide, high cheekbones set in a heart-shaped face. She is olive-skinned, and has long, straight black hair. She currently has no tattoos, pierced ears, and any other modifications are no one else's business. Clothing: Perfume: 3 always cold and sweet in the woods, naked and kneeling in the summer Helena is the daughter of Isadora Araña, then a Filipino-Egyptian languages student in London, and Marcus Gray, a fellow student in the arts program at the school. They were an odd couple: reserved, moody country boy and intense, aggressive city girl who'd been burned by oppression in her homeland, but they were very in love, or so Helena was later told, when they married and moved back to Newchurch. It wasn't at all because Isadora was pregnant or anything, of course not, that was just a happy side effect. Or something like that. Small town life proved impossible for a go-getter like Izzy to manage for very long, regardless, and by the time Helena was two, her remaining grandparent (paternal grandmother, Lillian) had died and her parents had split up. Isadora moved back to London, though Helena saw her twice a year until she was thirteen, when the visits abruptly stopped and were replaced by birthday cards with cash attached. Village life was dozy and quiet, and Marcus was a questionable parent at times in regards to attentiveness -- there are endless stories about things Helena got into while her father was having a fit of artistic temper or busy with his work -- but mostly it was quite isolated, when tourists weren't bothering them. (She got into loads of trouble with tourists, specifically one when she was seventeen. That one got ugly, and a bit scary.) There were a few little weird things - her grandmother whom she never met apparently had a list of special requirements for Helena's raising. She'd lost two daughters before having Helena's father, and had specific ideas as to how her descendants should be raised, accommodating for certain "quirks in genetics," as Marcus had put it--Helena had some medical procedure for a blood disorder she still doesn't completely understand, and this was before she was a year old. Though she does not remember it and bears no scars, she has vague, intermittent nightmares of that time, which is how she even found out about it in the first place. She has been on medication since she can remember, which her father now sends her in the mail; allegedly this is something herbal for the same blood disorder, which also bars her from ever giving blood. Fortunately, she's never been sick in her life, so she's never required hospitalization and the concerns that would carry with it. Helena knows it's weird, but she grew up with the strangeness. After such a rural childhood, it was a pretty easy decision to move to London as soon as she was eligible for university. It seemed like the best excuse to go, and though part of her felt guilty for leaving her father alone, another part of her questioned whether he'd even notice her absence half the time, frankly. She began school at King's College, along with the quick acclimation to city life, something she took to very quickly. Philosophy was her primary program at school, with a minor in Culture & Media; these have proven enjoyable, but not as challenging as she'd anticipated, leaving plenty of room to get into trouble, which is what her group of friends considered to be what Helena does best. By twenty, she'd experimented - copiously, and with great joie de vivre - with drugs, sex, and alcohol, and had developed a reputation for having a blasé attitude toward relationships (she was not always kind to boys), being generally unrepentantly fun-loving, and yet given to bouts of moody, withdrawn isolation. Shortly after turning twenty, however, she took up with a on-the-rise musician named Ashley ("Ash") Vaughn. Their relationship was volatile, to say the least, and off-and-on for the first few months, but eventually they settled into tentative monogamy. It wasn't Helena's first boyfriend, but it was the first one she thought she deeply cared for, or could possibly grow to love. At the end of Helena's third year of university, she was scouted for a modeling gig - lingerie, not couture, as she doesn't quite have the ultra-thin and lean body type required for couture. While she finished the shoot, it culminated in a walk-off, and the formulation of a friendship with another model, Thalia Lambert-Quinn, who'd been doing this for long enough to know when a shoot was going awry. (Also Helena threw a glass of grape juice over the creepy Terry Richardson-wannabe photographer's head whilst telling him exactly what she thought of his oral sex jokes, which was highly memorable for all involved. Her photos got printed, but she'd never be allowed to model again if she wanted to.) After the end of term in June, Helena moved in with Thalia, choosing a beautiful and none-too-cheap residence at Princess Park Manor. Her relationship with Ash progressed until a series of terrible incidents wherein he drunkenly cheated on her, she revenge-cheated on him, he threw a glass at her, she threw him out of his own hotel room half-dressed, and he nearly broke the door down, all of this occurring within the span of two weeks in early October of 2010. After that, they were pretty much broken up, and Helena decided to focus on her jobs - as an assistant at Blackbird Bakery, and the occasional freelance dancing gig, school, and life as a single girl. Which is about where things get a hell of a lot weirder. she was rhyme and the reason i left my life for a soul that was freezing game history maybe wrong, maybe way beyond redemption Helena is descended from one of the original lines of witches that were created in the pre-Flood area of history; her universe is based on the Yezidi belief system combined with aspects of Islamic and Judeo-Christian belief, meaning that the devil is the demiurge who created the earth, and was redeemed after his fall. Magic-users fall into two categories: sorcerers and sorceresses, for whom magic is a learned science, and witches, for whom it is an innate, instinctive art. Witches are varying levels of human, as they are the descendants of the Bene Elohim, children of the Nephilim, each of whom had five children, creating one thousand lines of witches. Because blood potency is vital to the power of a witch, the longer their line, the less powerful they tend to be, unless they take steps to rejuvenate the bloodline. Desperation in fading lines has led to some bad decisions. Shortly before the disappearing of all gods -- including that demiurge figure from Yezidi beliefs -- many angels, and some demons, eight brand-new lines of witches were created from the demiurge Melek Taus and his haftan (though each only had one child, and Melek Taus's descendant's star is on the rise). Three of those eight seemed to die out through assassination or in the heat of battle, leaving only five remaining. Concurrently to this, the rise of a black market began, dealing in the procurement and surgical fusion of supernatural beings' powers. Helena's own paternal grandmother, Lillian, was descended from Alice Gray of the Pendle Hill witches -- the lone witch who'd been deemed not guilty, but only because she'd mysteriously ended up on the wrong list -- had made a deal with some very bad beings, and she'd stolen the essence of the deceased Baia Sharmazanashvili, one of the three dead children of the haftan. By then, though, it was 1976, and Lillian was unable to have any more children besides her son, and men are generally not tremendously powerful in the matriarchal witches' society. Not to mention he was mostly ignorant of their past, but would let her help with the child. So she waited...until he brought her a daughter, fourteen years later. Her mother's ancestry made it even better, since the haftan seemed to prefer the minds of Middle Eastern women. That was the actual reason for Helena's traumatic, mysterious "surgery" as a child -- she was fed the soul and power of a dead witch she'd never met, so that her family's bloodline would be strong again. It's set up in a loosely organized fashion, so that she was bound as a child, grew up semi-normally, and her powers would be triggered by the arrival of an object of importance, along with a time-release system to allow the process to occur gradually: at eighteen, she began experiencing once-a-week intensive migraines, and by twenty-one, should be completely unbound. There were strings attached to that deal, though, and her well-meaning but incredibly Machiavellian grandmother is long gone to the grave, so no one's exactly around to tell her what kind of debts she's inherited. She'll just have to find out herself. Helena's various abilities are: caught between desire and intention to protect her from the summer personality i gave my word that i would only teach her, deep in believing girls that the wisdom would release her from her keepers and the summer boys overwhelmed, primitive emotions, struck by the river screaming for the ocean npcs silent now, no one else beguiling, lost in the woods The National - "Start a War" :: Do you really think you can just put it in a safe behind a painting, lock it up, and leave? You were always weird but I never had to hold you by the edges like I do now. Walk away now, and you're gonna start a war. Reamonn - "Supergirl" :: You can tell by the way she walks that she's my girl. You can tell by the way she talks, she rules the world. You can see in her eyes that no one is her Chi. She'd laugh the nighttime into the day, pushing her fears further along. She'd say, "it's okay, I got lost on the way, but I'm a Supergirl, and Supergirls don't cry." And then she'd say, "it's all right, I got home late last night, but I'm a Supergirl, and Supergirls just fly." And then she'd shout down the line, tell me she's got no more time, 'cause she's a Supergirl and Supergirls don't cry. She'd scream in my face tell me to leave, leave this place...she's sowing seeds, she's burning trees. Dexter Freebish - "Leaving Town" :: You're never lonely, and you're never home. I know you've been talking about leaving, you've lost all your feeling for this town. Paint your nails and put on your lipstick, you don't wanna miss your ticket out. Just because you graduate from school so high in the gene pool, that's your point of view, but when you're broken down, and no one else is around, you'll come running back to this town. Pack your bags, your smokes in your pocket, you're wearing my locket around your neck. Take a drag and wait for the greyhound; the world is your playground, and you wanna win. But when you're broken down, and no one else is around, you'll come running back to this town. I remember how we drank time together, and how you used to say that the stars are forever, and daydreamed about how to make your life better by leaving town. Nothing in life will ever come that easy; doesn't mean it has to be that hard. I know you will find out who you are. i hear her cry out bibliography a thought came down and the river washed away the sin storylines there's always something, there's always something that you can learn Helena Gray is a fictional character from a fictional world. Her lovely played-by is Canadian actress Shay Mitchell, can be seen in the television show Pretty Little Liars, very implausibly playing a high school student (seriously, she's older than I am); graphics are used for representational purposes. Lyrics used are from the IAMX song "Lolita". Category:Characters Category:Living